Scouting America Drops Diversity Initiatives at Jamboree

Scouting America’s National Jamboree, which ended Friday in the mountains of West Virginia, eliminated dedicated spaces for gay youth, women and scouts of color — changes that followed months of pressure from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to strip diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives from the century-old organization. About 15,000 scouts, leaders and volunteers attended the 10-day event at the Summit Bechtel Reserve in Fayette County, AP News reported.

A Century-Old Partnership Under Pressure

The military has provided logistical support for the National Jamboree since its inception in 1937, and Scouting America — rebranded from the Boy Scouts of America in 2024 — has long served as a pipeline to the armed forces, with Eagle Scouts heavily represented in ROTC programs, service academies and military leadership tracks.

That partnership came under unprecedented strain this year. Hegseth, who has made rooting out what he calls “woke” policies a signature priority, threatened to end the Pentagon’s century-old relationship with Scouting America unless it refocused away from diversity initiatives. In February, the two sides announced a deal to keep their ties intact — but with sharply conflicting accounts of what it entailed.

Hegseth said Scouting America would require members to use their “biological sex at birth and not gender identity” and bar biological boys and girls from sharing toilets, showers and tents. Scouting America insisted the agreement did not change its existing policies regarding transgender youth. “We have transgender people in our program and we’ll have transgender people in our program going forward,” President and CEO Roger Krone said at the time, according to an earlier AP report.

The reforms Hegseth outlined included discontinuing the Citizenship in Society merit badge — previously required for advancement to Eagle Scout — introducing a Military Service merit badge, waiving registration fees for children of active-duty, Guard and Reserve families, and restricting membership applications to “male” and “female” designations, Military.com reported. “This includes reviewing and replacing politicized, divisive and discriminatory language throughout the organization, programs and all publications. No more DEI. Zero,” Hegseth said.

The Jamboree Changes

The impact became visible at this year’s Jamboree, held at the 14,000-acre Summit Bechtel Reserve adjoining New River Gorge National Park. Reports circulated in April that Scouting America had canceled planned affinity spaces, including an LGBTQ+ space; the organization described the change as “programmatic.” The 2026 gathering offered mountain biking, kayaking, leadership programs and educational sessions, West Virginia Explorer reported, but no dedicated community areas for girls, scouts of color or LGBTQ+ participants.

Some scouts who had planned to attend backed out. “Scouting fundamentally is a safe place for young people to have fun,” said Samuel J. Aronson, an assistant scoutmaster who organized inclusive events at previous national jamborees. “In the absence of these spaces, we’re denying all that, both the safety and the fun, to thousands of young people.”

John Andrew Segebarth, a 21-year-old gay Eagle Scout and 2024 national officer, also stayed away. “Scouting’s kind of walking back on its values that they told me they believed in,” he said.

Others attended and tried to fill the gap. Layla Grace, a 21-year-old transgender assistant scoutmaster whose first accepting community space was a previous Jamboree tent, volunteered at an area focused on mental health, food security and education. “I am wearing so many rainbows on me, my right hand has my nails painted in the lesbian flag and my left hand has my nails painted in the transgender flag,” she said. “I am being as loud as I can to do my best to hopefully make up for the lack of community spaces.”

A Scouting America spokesperson said the organization remains “fully committed to welcoming and serving all youth,” but did not address questions about the Jamboree changes.

The Memorandum Comes to Light

The agreement behind the changes became public through an improbable source: James Dale, who was expelled from the Boy Scouts in the early 1990s for being gay and later was the plaintiff in the landmark 2000 Supreme Court case Boy Scouts of America v. Dale. After the Pentagon refused a Freedom of Information Act request filed in late March, Dale sued in federal court in June to compel release of the six-page memorandum of understanding.

The document spells out how the Defense Department will monitor compliance, including “periodic touchpoints” between officials. In an op-ed for The Advocate, Dale wrote that the public deserves to read the agreement for itself — particularly with the Pentagon expected to evaluate Scouting America’s progress on or around August 27. “They basically have their thumb on the organization, threatening them under constant pressure,” he told AP News.

The fight carries a pointed legal irony, Dale argued. The Supreme Court held in 2000 that the government could not compel the Scouts to include him as a gay member. Now, he wrote, the government is leveraging its partnership to push the organization to exclude transgender youth — obtaining by contract what the Court once held it could not command by law. “How could the government say the Scouts had the right to expel me because I was gay, but then turn around and tell them they could not have transgender kids?” he wrote.

What the Dispute Signals

The clash sits at the intersection of the Trump administration’s anti-DEI agenda and one of the most deeply institutionalized public-private partnerships in American life. President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order, “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” underpins the Pentagon’s demands, and Scouting America has said its programmatic changes were necessary to comply while preserving its name and service to more than 200,000 girls in its programs.

The organization is navigating the dispute at a fragile moment. Still recovering from a sexual abuse scandal that drove it into bankruptcy — a $2.4 billion settlement plan compensating more than 80,000 claimants was upheld in 2023 — Scouting America’s membership has slipped to roughly 900,000 to 1 million youths, down from more than 1 million a year earlier. Keeping the military partnership intact, with its access to bases, facilities and recruiting pipelines, appears to have outweighed the inclusivity push that defined its recent rebrand.

What’s Next

The Pentagon is expected to assess by late August whether Scouting America has made “substantial progress” toward the memorandum’s terms. The evaluation will determine whether the armed forces continue their logistical support, and it will be closely watched by families, advocates and the scouts caught in between. For critics, the question is whether Scouting America can preserve its stated commitment to welcoming all youth while operating under a federal agreement that many believe is pushing it in the opposite direction.